Possumpocalypse

This is a wild and smelly story, so I’ll start with the happy ending:  we have no more fleas! (Some of you might remember I kicked off this blog in 2019 with a post about how I ended up naked in my garage, being chased by a horde of fleas.) The source of the fleas is gone now, and they’re never coming back. We thought they were just coming from the grass in the backyard… we had no idea! 

The day of our glorious victory over the fleas happened a couple months ago. Tangent: I didn’t have time to write about it until now because I started a part-time job as a barista at a Chinese boba tea shop in my neighborhood. I am the only non-native Chinese speaker working there. And yes, I am including myself as a Chinese speaker. I have spent hours on Duolingo learning helpful phrases like “My last name is also Wang!” My colleagues have patiently written out words on index cards for me and helped me drill them. I’m still rocky on the tones, but I can say things like “I need the scissors” and “Sorry, we don’t have a bathroom here.” (We actually do, but where’s the fun in saying that?) 

Back to the possums. On one fateful day in early October, the house started to smell funky. Was it the trash can? The fridge? We couldn’t quite find it. 

The next morning the smell was exponentially worse. It was definitely rotting meat. It was coming from somewhere under the sunroom, or maybe even under the kitchen floor. Hard to tell. Nasty. 

Erik immediately went into emergency mode because several years ago there was a similar bad smell lingering in the house, and it turned out to be a dead raccoon under the porch. It was a very traumatic experience for him. 

This time it seemed like the same story: an animal had probably crawled under our sunroom and died. We were planning to demolish that sunroom anyway because it was built on an old rotting wood deck and had been causing home repair headaches for years. So we started digging holes through the floor, looking for tunnels or fur or something that would lead us to the putrid corpse. 

The sunroom floor, as it turns out, was made of several layers that had to be dealt with independently: first hard tile, then tar paper, then plywood sheets, then the wood deck. It took us most of a Saturday to smash/drill/pry up/saw four holes in the floor so we could gain visual access to the entirety of the nine-inch-high crawlspace under the deck. To no avail… there were still no dead animals in sight. 

I borrowed our neighbors’ two dogs and let them sniff around in the sunroom, hoping they would lead us to the culprit. Indeed, they gravitated toward one spot very close to my kitchen door. 

We continued to dig around. Part of the kitchen was an add-on to the house, and the foundation under it was a shoddy bit of concrete work that didn’t go nearly as deep as it should. Suddenly as we dug, a wall of dirt gave way, and a large cavern opened up underneath the concrete slab. A nauseating wave of stench hit us both. We were close! 

At that moment, I was the one hunched over the hole digging. Erik wanted me to put my hand into the cavern and scoop to clear it out, but some kind of primitive horror stopped me from reaching into the darkness. An image of zombie raccoon teeth flashed through my mind. Even with a work glove on, even if you’re positive the animal is dead, you don’t go sticking your hand into animal dwellings, right?

Right. Because five minutes later as we continued to dig, THREE BABY POSSUMS exploded forth from the cavern! 

I just want to say that I did not scream. I think I should get credit for that. I did jump several times and throw my shovel, but not a sound escaped my lips. I was too busy inhaling and calculating whether to stay and fight or run for my life. 

Meanwhile Erik, ever the level-headed Arkansas country boy, was systematically dispatching possums with his shovel. Bam. One down. Bam. Two down. One got away. 

Just as I thought the crisis was over, the real terror was unleashed: a monster mother possum burst out of the hole! This is the largest possum I have ever seen. (To be fair, I haven’t seen very many possums. But other people looked at a picture of this possum later and they all said it was the biggest possum they had ever seen as well. And they were all Texans.) 

Erik calmly and deliberately held it down in the dirt with a shovel. “I’m going to need your help with this one, babe,” he said. (SHUDDER.) I wish I could write “It was one of those glorious moments where the marriage partnership is forged even stronger as we slaughtered that possum side by side.” But that’s not quite how it happened. 

In a show of bravado, I came to his aid, brandishing some kind of crowbar. I summoned all my Air Force Academy survival training memories (where they made us kill rabbits, but it was actually very humane and purely for food preparation purposes) and popped the possum several times on the head as hard as I could. 

It laughed at me. I’m serious. It didn’t make any noise but it was obvious the possum was completely unharmed. Erik quietly assessed the situation and decided we’d better switch roles. 

So I held the possum down with all my might, turned away and closed my eyes. I’m not sure of the details after that, but the scene ends with Erik holding up this massive dead possum by its tail in triumph. (Or maybe it was in an attempt to convince me that it was really dead and it would be safe for me to let go of the shovel now.) 

We finished digging out the cavern (very carefully this time, with our hands well protected) and finally pulled out the cause of our troubles:  a very thin, maggot-infested, partially-fur-covered dead baby possum. (If you’re gagging just reading that, imagine being the one to pull it out and smell it.) 

Can you believe a whole family of possums went on living like that with their DEAD FAMILY MEMBER IN THEIR DEN?? Possums are scavengers… were they snacking on it? I have no idea but the whole thought of possums living UNDER MY KITCHEN was repulsive enough on its own. I was very happy when the excavation was over! 

This is shameful, but it’s true:  we took all those dead possums and tossed them over the back fence. Our property backs up to the dark corner of a hotel parking lot on a very large wooded lot where no one ever walks. We have a lot of turkey vultures and things that come around and clean up roadkill, so we thought the vacant lot was a good place to give nature a chance at fulfilling its own cycle on these critters. (They were probably eaten for lunch by another family of possums. Possibly extended relatives of our late possum tenants. Puts a new spin on “Who’s coming over for Thanksgiving dinner?”)

The next day we smoothed out a larger space around the possum cavern and poured in 20 bags of concrete so we won’t have any more sub-kitchen dwellers. During that project, we uncovered something leathery in the dust and pried it up. (I wish I could post pictures of all these things here, but then I’d have to censor this blog because they’re so graphic.) It was a mummified body of an adult possum. Probably Grandpa. 

We tossed it over the fence too. As we walked back, Erik clapped the dust off his work gloves with finality and said, “Well, babe, we put three generations of possums over that fence.” 

Postscript: That’s the story of our possumpocalypse. As Donald Miller says, sometimes you need an inciting incident to spark change. That little dead possum (or rather, the smell of its little rotting body) was our inciting incident to finish demolishing the sunroom. It was a long time coming. Now we have a bigger backyard and more natural light in the house. We’re happier people. And best of all, we’re looking forward to a new year without fleas!